Chapter Sixteen Out of Bounds
Sixteen
Out of Bounds
The last stop but one was scheduled an hour before the bus reached the terminus in Baku.
Lyra didn’t leave the compartment, but sat with Asta watching passengers leave the bus while others joined.
She could see Ionides moving inconspicuously here and there on the platform, as if he were merely stretching his legs, but he never went far from the bus and his eyes were scanning everyone in sight.
“We could do with a map of Baku,” said Asta. “I wonder where the Hüseyn Javid Prospekt is.”
“We could do with a map of the Caspian Sea and everything beyond it. And a timetable of ferry routes, if there is such a thing. And a phrase book. Being on a luxurious bus has made me spoiled, Asta.”
“I expect it’ll get difficult again before long. But this Magisterium agent might have nothing to do with us, you know. He might be on some other business altogether.”
“Look,” Lyra said, “he’s seen him.”
Ionides was standing next to a newsstand, against the wall, where the anbaric light from the other side didn’t reach him.
He was holding a newspaper up, but his eyes and those of his gecko daemon were fixed on a man wearing a cloth cap, who was strolling aimlessly, just as Ionides himself had been doing.
Lyra sat back and moved the curtain a little way across the window.
Asta crouched lower on the table, and neither of them took their eyes off cloth-cap man.
He’d been called Dumitriu when Ionides had seen him before, and he might well have been Romanian—a nondescript blue suit, hands in his trouser pockets, a small mustache.
His daemon was a sparrow, who sat on his shoulder looking behind as they sauntered along the platform.
“She’s seen Mr. Ionides,” said Asta.
The sparrow was chirping something into Dumitriu’s ear. He inclined his head but didn’t look round.
The driver sounded the horn of the bus as a signal that they were about to leave. Dumitriu turned slowly and waited to let other passengers get on first.
“He’s watching without looking at him,” Lyra said.
“If Mr. Ionides doesn’t move quickly, the bus’ll leave without him,” said Asta.
Ionides was carefully folding his newspaper. Then he looked all round, and gazed at the announcement board, pretending to check the time against a wristwatch he didn’t have.
The last passengers were boarding. Dumitriu wasn’t looking at Ionides, but his daemon was.
They moved before Ionides, joining the last two or three people at the steps up to the bus door, and then Dumitriu suddenly looked directly at Lyra, who was too startled to prevent herself from moving back quickly out of sight.
“Stupid, stupid,” she murmured. “He knows we’re here, and I just confirmed it. Fine spy I’d be.”
“He also knows that you know, and you’re watching him,” Asta pointed out. “And Ionides saw what happened, so he’ll be aware of everything too.”
“But if I’d had my wits about me…”
“Not so easy without Pan. I should have done what he’d have done, and warned you. It was my fault too.”
“At least we know what he looks like,” she said.
Ionides was the last to board, just before the doors closed. Then they could see nothing more outside, for the bus was moving away into the dark.
—
The bus station in Baku was still being built.
Clearly Mustafa Bey’s investment was being energetically spent; construction work was going on through the night, and men were clambering over scaffolding and unloading pallets of cement and sand from a line of lorries.
A spotlight illuminated the entire height of a crane that was lifting a concrete beam into place.
In the middle of it all, buses lined up to embark and disembark their passengers from the four platforms that were already complete underground.
Before the bus came to a halt, while it was still waiting in line on the ramp with the engine throbbing, there was a knock on the door of Lyra’s compartment, and an attendant came in with a note. It was written in pencil on a scrap of newspaper, and it said:
Big clock on Platform One. Go straight there and wait for me. A.I.
She had never seen an example of Ionides’s writing before; this was sharp, spiky, but perfectly legible. She read it with Asta.
“Which platform do we stop at, I wonder?” the daemon said.
By pressing her head to the window, Lyra was able to see a little way along the length of the platform, but could see no sign of a number.
The crowds of people leaving the buses ahead were jostling with those waiting to board; it was going to be hard to force her way through and stay aware of the man who’d be following.
Asta said, “Maybe wait to leave till we’ve seen cloth-cap man get off.”
That startled her a little. Asta was following her thoughts just as Pan did.
“Yes,” she said as the bus moved forward to take the place of the one before. “Ah, look—there’s a sign—this is Platform Two.”
The bus came to a halt. The platform was still thronged. The doors of the bus hissed as the pneumatic mechanism swung them open, and attendants lowered a step.
Lyra peered around the edge of the curtain, ready to move back the moment Dumitriu turned to look for her.
But the door was too far along the body of the bus to see fully, and the crowd was pressing; those getting out were crowding around waiting for their luggage; others eager to meet families or friends arriving were pushing forward trying to see them; still others were keen to get aboard quickly and find their seats.
“I’m looking for the cloth cap, but he might have taken it off,” Lyra said. “He wasn’t very memorable otherwise. And I can’t see Mr. Ionides at all.”
“Is there only one door?”
“No—we got on at the front, didn’t we—or maybe this is the exit and that was the entrance…”
The crowd was thinning.
“We’ll have to go,” said Asta.
Lyra stood up, made sure her stick was just under the flap of her rucksack, and said, “Right. Come up to my shoulder. Sit on the rucksack if you like. But we haven’t got a choice, really.”
Asta was there in one leap. So unlike the feeling of Pan close to her; strange and disturbing, but reassuring too.
She slid open the door of the compartment, prepared to meet Dumitriu face to face, but of course he wasn’t there.
A handful of passengers were still lining up to get off—a young man and woman carrying a baby, a middle-aged man in sober clothes and horn-rimmed glasses carrying a briefcase, an elderly woman accompanied by a nurse, and no Dumitriu in sight.
Further back along the bus, cleaners were already sweeping the floor and gathering rubbish.
Lyra took her place behind the woman and the nurse, who were slow and careful descending the steps. Asta murmured, “Can’t see them anywhere. Either of them.”
Once they were out of the bus, Lyra looked around for a sign to the other platforms. There was a wide flight of steps going up on the left, and a sign on the platform above it with numbered arrows pointing left and right.
Like everywhere else in the station, the platform and the stairs had a not-quite-finished, provisional appearance: wide pillars of raw concrete, anbaric lamps hanging from bare wires, floors without tiling, signs temporarily fixed to the walls.
The arrows over the stairs were at least clear to read: they indicated that Platform One was to the left.
Lyra was looking ahead, Asta behind.
“Can you see them?” Lyra said quietly.
“No. Keep going.”
Lyra moved out to get past the woman with the nurse. The young couple were heading for the stairs as well, and the baby was crying. The man had a heavy suitcase in each hand, and the young woman was struggling with a bulging shoulder bag as well as the baby, and looked on the edge of tears herself.
Lyra thought: If we’re with them, Dumitriu’s less likely to attack.
“Yes,” whispered Asta. “Go on.”
They were at the foot of the flight of steps. She said to the young woman, “Can I help you? Can I carry that bag for you?”
The woman turned her head, bewildered, helpless, worn out.
It was clear that she hadn’t understood.
Lyra gestured, and the woman’s goldfinch daemon, perching with the baby, said something to her.
She understood, and nodded in gratitude.
As she moved to let the shoulder bag slip off, the young man said a few words sharply.
“It’s all right, honestly,” said Lyra, and then to her surprise Asta said something in what must have been their language.
The young man said something short in reply, and nodded. The woman let Lyra take her bag, and all three of them climbed the staircase slowly.
At the top Lyra gave back the bag and smiled at the baby, the man’s dog daemon swung his tail in approval, and the family smiled their thanks and turned away to the right.
Lyra began to make her way along the crowded bridge towards the stairs down to Platform One.
She watched every one of the passengers ahead of her, confident that Asta was looking behind.
Dumitriu was not visible anywhere, and neither was Ionides.
Horn-rimmed-glasses man was some way ahead, but she saw no one else she recognized, and she soon lost him.
The stairs gave onto a wide corridor, lit by a harsh fluorescent glare, and most of the passengers moved that way, leaving only a few to continue down to the darker level of Platform One.
“See them anywhere?” she whispered.
“No. But there’s the big clock,” Asta replied.
It hung on an iron bracket over the middle of the platform. It said the time was twenty past ten.
Asta jumped down and prowled ahead, looking to left and right.
The noise from the rest of the station was muted at this level; there didn’t seem to be any buses expected soon, because there were only two or three people sitting on the benches along the wall, or standing reading a timetable on the wall.
Lyra had seen none of them before, and certainly Dumitriu wasn’t one of them.